He received an awfully lovely parting gift

Carl Icahn tweeted on Wednesday that he was out of Netflix. He received an awfully lovely parting gift.

The famed investor made a reported $2 billion on his investment in the online streaming service. After announcing a 7-for-1 stock split on Tuesday, Netflix stock reached a record high Wednesday just before Icahn sold the last of his shares.

This Problem Is Unexpectedly Crushing Many Retirement Dreams

Housing is most Americans' most important source of retirement security. So a sharp reduction in the rate of ownership, coupled with rising rents, is taking a toll.

The housing bust of 2008 touched every homeowner. The subsequent recovery has been selective, mainly benefiting those with the resources and credit to invest. This has had a more damaging effect on individuals’ retirement security than many might expect.

For a quarter century, home equity has been the largest single source of wealth for all but the richest households nearing retirement age, accounting for 44% of net worth in the 1990s and 35% today, new research shows. The home equity percentage of net worth is greatest among homeowners with the least wealth, reaching 50% for those with median net worth of $42,460, according to a report from The Hamilton Project, a think tank closely affiliated with the Brookings Institution.

By comparison, the share of net worth in retirement accounts is just 33% for all but the wealthiest households, a figure that drops to 21% for low-wealth households. So a housing recovery that leaves out low-income families is especially damaging to the nation’s retirement security as a whole.

There can be little doubt that low-income households largely have missed the housing recovery. Homeownership in the U.S. has been falling for eight years, down to 63.7% in the first quarter from a peak of over 69% in 2004, according to a report from Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies. Former homeowners are now renters, frozen out of the market by their own poor credit and stricter lending standards.

Meanwhile, rents are rising, taking an additional toll on many Americans’ ability to save for retirement. On average, the number of new rental households has increased by 770,000 annually since 2004, making 2004 to 2014 the strongest 10-year stretch of rental growth since the late 1980s.

The uneven housing recovery is contributing to an expanding wealth gap, the report suggests. Among households near retirement age, those in the top half of the net worth spectrum had more wealth in 2013, adjusted for inflation, than the top half in 1989. Those in the bottom half had less wealth.

Housing is by no means the only concern registered in the report. Much of what researchers point to is fairly well known: Only half of working Americans expect to have enough money to live comfortably in retirement; longevity is putting a strain on retirement resources; half of American seniors will pay out-of-pocket expenses for long-term services and supports; the percentage of dedicated retirement assets in traditional defined-benefit plans has shrunk from two-thirds in 1978 to one third today.

All of this diminishes retirement security. Individuals must adapt, and with so much riding on our personal ability to manage our own financial affairs it is surprising that the report goes to some lengths to play down the importance of what has blossomed into a broad financial education effort in the U.S.

Financial acumen is generally lacking among Americans and, for that matter, most of the world. Just half of pre-retirees, and far fewer younger folks, can correctly answer three basic questions about inflation, compound growth, and diversification, according one often-cited study. Yet researchers at The Hamilton Project assert that it is an “open question” as to whether public resources should be spent on educational efforts, citing evidence of its effectiveness as “underwhelming.”

I have argued that we cannot afford not to spend money on this effort. Yet I also understand the benefits of promoting things like automatic enrollment into 401(k) plans and automatic escalation of contributions, which The Hamilton Project seems to prefer. The truth is we need to do all of it, and more.

Why Biotech Stocks Are So Wildly Unpredictable

Jean-Christophe Verhaegen—AFP/Getty ImagesA photo taken on November 27, 2012 shows a sample of a plant before a biochemical analysis at the INRA Nancy (National Institute of Agronomic Research) in Champenoux.

To understand why some investors are growing nervous about the biotech sector, consider the recent IPO of Axovant Sciences. The company was founded last October, isn’t profitable, and has already racked up a $21 million loss. Its CEO has much more experience with hedge funds than he does with biotech startups. Axovant has only one product candidate, an Alzheimer drug it bought from GlaxoSmithKline last December after it was tested on 1,250 patients in 13 trials and then stalled in development.

Two weeks ago, Axovant went public in an offering that raised $315 million. Axovant, which paid $5 million for the Alzheimer’s drug, says it needs the cash because it will have to pay Glaxo as much as $160 million more if the drug makes it to market. Incredibly, the stock doubled on its first day to $31 a share, but has since fallen by nearly a third of that peak value.

And it could well fall further. But that’s not what worries longtime observers of the biotech sector. The real fear is that this kind of speculative behavior among investors is all too familiar from the biotech and dot-com bubbles of 2000.

“The fact that someone can make something of this size out of virtually nothing should be of concern to everyone in the industry,” Fierce Biotech editor John Carroll wrote about the Axovant IPO. “When biotech mania takes over and perfectly legal schemes like this rain money, the pitfalls start to look like the Grand Canyon.”

Of the 129 biotech companies that have gone public since early 2013, few are as speculative as Axovant. Many, though, have recently gone public with huge losses incurred by heavy spending on the development of drugs that may or may not find approval from U.S. and foreign regulators. Even those that do may be so specialized in the diseases they treat that they may not become blockbusters.

If the party in biotech stocks is over, a lot of investors don’t seem to have gotten the message. The S&P 500 Biotech Index has nearly tripled in the past three years. The index had stalled and moved sideway for much of the past spring, leading some to wonder whether the rally was spent. Instead, it’s gained another 11.3% over the past month. The Nasdaq Composite, by contrast, is up only 2.5%.

Several factors have been fueling the biotech rally of the past three years. For one thing, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has been pushing to speed up approvals. According to Ernst & Young, the FDA approved 41 new drugs in 2014, up from 27 a year earlier.

Meanwhile, the genomics-based insights that emerged in the early 2000s are finally delivering on new drug therapies. That in turn has led biotech firms to increase their research and development spending by 20% a year. After a decade or more of few promising drugs, the new generation is finally bearing financial fruit. Revenue at U.S. and European biotech firms rose 24% last year, while net income rose 231%, Ernst & Young reckons.

While new drugs may continue to come through the drug pipeline, the risk is they won’t benefit any and all biotech firms, but rather a select few. In the meantime, more investor cash is pouring into the sector indiscriminately, even into more questionable startups like Axovant. Some investors suggest it’s safer to stick with the larger companies – the so-called Big Biotech firms – that have a few promising drugs in the works as well as a track record of high growth.

Biotech stocks are vexing for many individual investors because, more than Internet or other tech stocks, they involve arcane science, a long and complex approval process, and a business model that involves largely hit-or-miss products. At the same time, no one wants to sit on the sidelines while a stock – let alone an entire sector – can double in value over the course of a year.

Many individual investors have opted to invest in biotech ETFs and mutual funds. Both of them have outperformed the broader market, but of the two, biotech ETFs have been the stronger performers. The Fidelity Select Biotechnology fund (FBIOX), for example, has risen 27% so far this year, or nearly three times as much as the Nasdaq Composite.

Several ETFs are doing as well or even better. The iShares Nasdaq Biotech ETF (IBB), which tracks biotech stocks on the Nasdaq, is up 26%. The SPDR Biotech ETF (XBI), which tracks the S&P Biotech Index, is up 39%. And the ALPS Medical Breakthrough ETF (SBIO), which began trading in early 2015, is up 47%.

The XBI and SBIO funds have outperformed because they focus more on small and mid-sized biotech companies. Nine out of the ten largest holdings in the XBI have risen more than 50% this year, and seven of them have more than doubled.

The IBB, which has emerged as something of a proxy for the industry for many investors, is weighted much more heavily to bigger, more proven biotech companies. Its top ten holdings make up 59% of the ETF’s value, including giants like Gilead Sciences, Biogen and Amgen.

The volatility of small- and mid-sized biotech stocks mean they will fall sharply once the inevitable correction comes, whether they have promising drugs in the works or not. The wildcard in the sector is the possibility of a wave of M&A, which could drive up some stocks. Synageva Biopharma, for example, has risen 140% this month on news of a buyout by a larger biotech firm, Alexion Pharmaceuticals.

But if picking which company has the next blockbuster drug is tough, anticipating the next M&A target is even trickier. And the longer the biotech rally continues, the more important it becomes to pick the winners from the losers. At some point, for the average investors, staying on the sidelines becomes the smarter play.

Most of us don't think in probabilities -- but we should.

Statistician Nate Silver correctly predicted the outcome of every state in the 2012 presidential election. It instantly shot him to fame in a field most people associate with the most boring class they ever took. He’s been on The Daily Show twice. He has more than a million Twitter followers.

But the most important part of Silver’s analysis is that he’s not really making predictions. Not in the way most people think of predictions, at least.

You will never hear Silver say, “He is going to win the election.” You might hear him say, “He has a 60% chance of winning,” or “The odds are in her favor.” Pundits make predictions. Nate Silver calculates probabilities.

All probabilities of less than 100% admit a chance of more than one outcome. Silver put a 60% chance of Obama winning Florida in the 2012 election, which, of course, implied a 40% chance that he wouldn’t win. Silver’s pre-election probability map gave Obama the edge. But, had Mitt Romney won the state, it wouldn’t necessarily have meant Silver was wrong. In his book The Signal and the Noise, Silver wrote:

Political partisans may misinterpret the role of uncertainty in a forecast; they will think of it as hedging your bets and building in an excuse for yourself in case you get the prediction wrong. That is not really the idea. If you forecast that a particular incumbent congressman will win his race 90 percent of the time, you’re also forecasting that he should lose it 10 percent of the time. The signature of a good forecast is that each of these probabilities turns out to be about right over the long run … We can perhaps never know the truth with 100 percent certainty, but making correct predictions is the way to tell if we’re getting closer.

What set Silver apart is that he thinks of the world in probabilities, while the punditry crowd of coin-flipping charlatans thinks in black-and-white certainties. His mind is open to a range of potential outcomes before, during, and — most important — after he’s made his forecast. Things might go this way, or they might go that way. He adjusts the odds of certain outcomes when new information arrives. It’s the most effective way to think about the future.

Why don’t more people think like Nate Silver?

Twenty years ago, Berkshire Hathaway vice chairman Charlie Munger gave a talk called The Psychology of Human Misjudgment. He listed 25 biases that lead to bad decisions. One is the “Doubt-Avoidance Tendency,” which he described:

The brain of man is programmed with a tendency to quickly remove doubt by reaching some decision.

It is easy to see how evolution would make animals, over the eons, drift toward such quick elimination of doubt. After all, the one thing that is surely counterproductive for a prey animal that is threatened by a predator is to take a long time in deciding what to do.

In other words, most of us don’t think in probabilities. It’s natural to quickly seek one answer and commit to it.

If you watch financial TV, or read investing news, you will almost never hear someone say there’s a 55% chance of a recession this year. They say there is going to be a recession this year. Rarely does an analyst say there’s a 60% chance of a bear market this year. They say there is going to be a bear market this year. There’s no room for error. There are no probabilities. People want exact answers, and pundits are happy to oblige.

Consumers of financial news are part of the problem. Not knowing what the future holds is scary. But you don’t gain much confidence hearing someone say there’s a 60% chance of one outcome and a 40% chance of another. We are more likely to listen to a forecaster who uses unwavering confidence to insist they know the future. It’s like warm milk for our fears.

But thinking in certainties is usually a reflection of how you want the world to work, rather than how it actually works. Silver writes:

Acknowledging the real-world uncertainty in [pundits’] forecasts would require them to acknowledge to the imperfections in their theories about how the world was supposed to behave — the last thing that an ideologue wants to do.

If you have a view of the world that says raising taxes will slow the economy, no amount of information will change your mind. You won’t tolerate a claim of an 80% chance a tax cut could slow the economy, because it leaves open the possibility that your entire world view about tax cuts could be wrong.

One of the top reasons investors make mistakes is that the world works in probabilities, but people want to think in certainties. It’s why bear markets surprise people, banks use too much leverage, budget forecasts are always wrong, and most pundits make themselves look like idiots.

As soon as you start thinking probabilities, all kinds of things change. You’ll prepare for risks you disregarded before. You’ll listen to people you disagreed with before. You won’t be surprised when a recession or a bear market that no one predicted occurs. All of this makes you better at handling and navigating the future — which is the point of forecasting in the first place.

Here’s Silver again:

The more eagerly we commit to scrutinizing and testing our theories, the more readily we accept that our knowledge of the world is uncertain, the more willingly we acknowledge that perfect prediction is impossible, the less we will live in fear of our failures, and the more liberty we will have to let our minds flow freely. By knowing more about what we don’t know, we may get a few more predictions right.

Q: My 89-year-old father has $750,000 after selling his Medtronic stock and paying capital gains. He’d like to make a low-risk investment with easy accessibility, but one that would give him more than a savings account. Any suggestions? — Karen

A: Before your father gets too focused on where he should reinvest the proceeds of this sale, it’s important to ask how this fits into the bigger picture of his finances, says Shari Burns, a chartered financial analyst and managing director with United Capital in Seattle.

Given the current state of the bond market — interest rates are very low but poised to move higher this year, which would threaten the value of older bonds — there is no simple answer for making a low-risk investment that is easily accessible and that pays more than just a savings account.

“Preserving principal is one priority, and getting a better return than a savings account is another,” says Burns, noting that any time you look for additional reward, you’re taking on additional risk.

With that in mind, your father needs to think about his priorities and his timeline. Let’s consider three scenarios:

Scenario # 1: He needs all the proceeds of the stock sale to support his cost of living.

Under this scenario, he should start with how much he needs and for roughly how many years. Working backwards will help him determine the right balance of risk and reward.

In simplistic terms, his $750,000 translates to $75,000 in annual income for the next 10 years. To keep up with inflation and preserve capital consider a mix of cash and individual bonds.

Burns suggests keeping $250,000 in a savings account to draw on over the next few years. “If short-term rates go up, then the interest on the savings account will rise,” she says.

Your dad can then invest the remaining $500,000 in a laddered bond portfolio of individual Treasury securities. A simple way to build such a “ladder” is to divide that money equally among Treasuries maturing in two-year increments, starting with 2-year notes and going out to 10-year securities.

At current rates, those Treasuries are paying out 0.72%, 1.29%, 1.74%, 2.07% and 2.33% respectively. So combined, this $500,000 ladder will average 1.63% per year or $8,140 in annual income for the first few years.

“As you spend down the savings account, you will replenish your cash as bonds mature in the years that remain,” she says. “After 10 years your portfolio will be depleted.” It’s important to point out that because your father is holding these bonds to maturity, rising rates aren’t a concern.

Scenario #2: He doesn’t need the additional income but will rest easy knowing it’s safe.

Under the second scenario — which we’ll venture to say is the most likely based on the size of this single holding – he will probably want to keep about 70% to 75% of these funds in cash and a short-term bond fund, such as the Vanguard Short-Term Bond Index VANGUARD SHORT-TERM BOND INDEX INVVBISX0.19%.

The remaining 25% to 30% should go to a low-cost stock fund, such as the Schwab S&P 500 Index fund SCHWAB S&P 500SWPPX-0.24% or the Vanguard Total World Stock Index fund VANGUARD TOTAL WORLD STK INDEX INVVTWSX0.2%. “The stock portion of the portfolio will provide growth over time, which will keep the total portfolio ahead of inflation,” she says. Because neither the bond market nor the stock market are exactly cheap, however, it makes sense to dollar-cost average into these portfolios over the next six months to a year.

Scenario #3: He wants to preserve wealth to eventually pass this on to his heirs or charity.

Finally, if your father is more focused on long-term wealth preservation, he may want to rethink his goal and invest for the long term, she says. “He will want the capital to rise faster than inflation to maintain the purchasing power of his wealth,” she says. Use the same approach described above, only plan to bring the equity portion up to 50% to 60% of this segment of the portfolio.

Why the bond market rises as the days get longer.

Ah, springtime. It’s the time of year when the trees and the flowers start to blossom, the birds start singing, the weather warms up, the grass turns green, and…Treasury bond returns start to rise?

Seasonal clichés are not unusual in the market, “sell in May and go away” is a classic that seems to hold in the equity market. Since 1950, according to the Stock Trader’s Almanac, the Dow averages a 7.5% gain in the November through April periods and only a 0.3% gain from May through October.

Given that relationship, it stands to reason that in aggregate bonds, there would be a relatively better investment in May through October. If you do pull some of your money out of stocks, you are not just going to hide it under the mattress.

Why these relationships hold is another matter. Lower trading volumes in the summer, vacation effects, and other theories have been posted over the years.

Lisa Kramer, a researcher at the University of Toronto, has a different theory. Her team finds that Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) can be extended beyond the effect on individual investors to produce a tangible effect on the overall market. The shorter, gloomier days of winter appear to be having a measurable effect on the bond market.

Kramer’s group found that monthly returns on Treasuries change by 80 basis points on average from October to April. Bond returns hit their peaks in the fall and troughs in the spring. After studying multiple potential factors, including the auction cycles for bonds and fluctuations in supply, Kramer’s group concluded that the appearance of the sun, if you will, reduces the overall effect of SAD and “brightens up” the bond market.

The full paper is scheduled to appear in an upcoming issue of Critical Finance Review.

What is the connection between SAD and bonds? Kramer suggests that it is risk aversion brought on by SAD. Her previous work on stocks suggested that seasonal cycles also affect stock markets through SAD-based risk aversion. Finding the opposite effects between the Northern and Southern hemispheres bolsters her argument, as one would expect given the opposite cycles of summer and winter. The full paper is not yet available for review, but the current summaries suggest a complementary pattern that explains bond returns using seasonal factors.

Should anything be done about this? Should all winter financial efforts in the U.S. take place in Phoenix or Miami from now on? That may spark some spirited discussions and pleading with financial executives, but we suggest that the solutions are simpler.

Traders are not always known for their life balance. Those who suffer from SAD should be encouraged to get out more often and take vacations in sunny locales to balance out their lives. That certainly seems like reasonable advice even without any stock market indicators. Meanwhile, traders suffering with more severe cases of SAD might benefit from various therapies. If you are in this position, there is more suffering going on than just with your market performance. Get the help you need.

Should you switch your ratios of investments to match the hemispheres? Probably not. Just like “sell in May and go away,” this finding is a generality. Monitor your investments with the usual broad view in mind.

We are looking forward to the next movie remake of Little Orphan Annie in which she visits Wall Street and sings, “Bond returns will go up tomorrow…you’ve got to buy bonds tomorrow, come what may!”

A Financial Planner’s Investment Advice for His Son — and Everyone Else

Father's Day has a financial adviser thinking about important lessons to be passing along.

A friend recently asked me to recommend a book for his son on buying and selling stocks.

As I pondered his request, I started thinking about the various books I’ve read or skimmed over my 24-plus years of working in financial services. Initially, I was overwhelmed with titles. Then I started thinking about my own teenaged son and the difficulty I was having getting him to think differently about his money—that he won’t always be able to depend on his parents to help him out. Anyway, I thought if I couldn’t compel a 14-year-old to change his ways, what could I say to my friend’s son, who’s in his 20s?

Finally, I asked myself what would I say—not bark, I promise—to my own son if he were in his 20s and came to me for investing advice? This is what I came up with:

You can go to just about any investment site (e.g. Vanguard, Schwab, or Fidelity) to learn the fundamentals of investing. You need to know, however, that the process of buying and selling is not hard. The real challenge is knowing what to buy, when to buy, and when to sell. If you plan to make investing a career, there is a lot more you need to know than you can learn from a website or book. That would require another conversation.

For now, I would advise you to think long and hard about why you want to invest. In other words, take time to map out your life goals for the next three to five years and the financial resources you will need to achieve them.

Simply saying you want to invest “to make money” will not work when you are invested in a fluctuating market. Short-term volatility can be a bear (pun intended). You have to be willing to ask how much money you can withstand losing when the market goes down, as well as how much profit is enough. As the old Wall Street saying goes, bulls make money in up markets, bears in down markets, and pigs get slaughtered. You also have to be willing to ask yourself how long you plan to stay invested, no matter how much the market fluctuates or falls.

Why am I focusing on declining markets and roller-coaster, up-and-down markets? It’s because people tend to fixate on rising stocks and profits, but pay very little attention to the markets’ inevitable declines. Everyone loves bull markets, which are great for the average investor. But when the market heads south quickly or takes a long, slow journey to the cellar, someone who was looking to make a quick profit can suffer a lot of stress.

Finally, I hope this short note does not come across as too preachy. I congratulate you on your interest in investing, and I will end by saying you are way ahead of the game because you’re thinking about investing now instead of later. Good luck.

Frank Paré is a certified financial planner in private practice in Oakland, California. He and his firm, PF Wealth Management Group, specialize in serving professional women in transition. Frank is currently on the board of the Financial Planning Association and was a recipient of the FPA’s 2011 Heart of Financial Planning award.

A Nobel Prize-Winning Economist Explains Why That’s Not a $10 Bill on the Sidewalk

Are markets efficient? Yes and no, says Robert Shiller.

+ READ ARTICLE

The stock market goes through big swings, commonly known as bubbles. Nobel economist Robert Shiller says these swings are the normal cycle of the market, but they don’t necessarily mean the market is inefficient. If a $10 bill is lying on the sidewalk, you’re going to pick it up, but when is the last time you actually saw a $10 on the sidewalk? Which leads to the classic joke about the economist who’s walking down the street.